The best compliment paid to Nelson Johnson for his new book about Atlantic City’s black population came from Rutgers-Newark professor Clement Price.

Price, a renowned scholar of African-American history, was asked to write a back-page blurb for “Northside.” He was so taken with the material, he offered to write the forward.

That was the second-best compliment.

The first came after Price read a column in this newspaper about Johnson before the launch of HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” based on the author’s serious and scholarly history of political corruption in Atlantic City. “I turn the page and there’s a picture of Nelson, and I thought, ‘My God, this guy is white!’ ” Price recalled. “All along, I assumed he was a black historian.”

Such was the “detail and sensitivity” to the material, Price said. “I thought this could have only been written by someone who had that history in their blood.”

It may not be in Johnson’s blood, but his upbringing in South Jersey’s rural, integrated, working-class neighborhoods shaped his relationship with African-Americans. He became further appreciative of their Atlantic City history while researching “Boardwalk Empire.”

“The Northside” is an extrapolation of that history.

“Black people built Atlantic City,” Johnson writes in “Northside.”
“In the early days, 1854 to 1890, starting with the construction of railroad, black people provided the muscle and sweat” for laying ties and tracks, leveling dirt into streets and hammering boards into housing and hotels.

“Between 1880 and 1930, approximately 95 percent of the hotel workforce was African-American,” he writes. Simply put, without them “the town we know today never comes to be.”

And this is how and why “Northside” began. In those early days, Atlantic City was the blackest city in America’s North. But segregation was a national institution, and so, a town of their own was formed within the city; a Harlem-by-the-Sea. It was a place of neon clubs and staid civic associations, segregated but stable in its middle-class values.
Johnson thoroughly documents this dynamic, and tells stories of the citizens and characters of “Northside.” Some made it an elegant place of black culture, such as model Joanna LaSane and beauty product entrepreneur Madame Sara Spencer Washington.

Some, such as swing drummer Chris Columbo and baseball Hall of Famer John Henry “Pop” Lloyd, played to a more visceral audience. But all contributed to the movement of civil rights, and Atlantic City’s Northside has a historic place in the era.
Johnson’s book tells it all; expertly — and with the sensitivity and detail Price described. Mark Di Ionno is a Star-Ledger columnist.